No.3
EMail, Attachments, Spam

Build you own Spamfilter.
Free alternative to Outlook Express.

As printed in the advisor | Additional information

Email has become an important part of our communication. But many people still have questions. Especially about so called “Spam” (unsolicited ad emails) and attachments, pictures in particular. Lets talk about email attachments first. This is actually pretty easy to do. At the top of your new message click on “Insert” than “File Attachment...”. (see below)
  

A new window appears on your screen. Just locate and select the file you want to send and click “attach”. Hold down the “Ctrl” key for multiple files while you select. (see below)
  
Pictures are a specialty because of their size. High quality pictures today can take several Megabytes. In other words they take forever to send and to receive. Normally the receiver doesn't need the picture in high resolution and therefore you can resize it. I have quick and simple step by step instructions on this weeks web site.

• Open Microsoft Paint. It comes with Windows. You can also click “start” then
  “run” and type in “mspaint.exe” without the quotes.
• Click “File” then “Open” and select the picture you want to resize.
  

• Click “Image” “Stretch/Skew”
  

• Enter equal values under Horizontal and Vertical stretch (below 100%)
  

• If the result is not as expected (e.g. Picture to small or still to big), Undo by selecting
  “Edit” “Undo”
• When you have the desired size click “File”, “Save as” and type in the new filename.
• If you use “Save” instead of “Save as ” you will overwrite your original file.

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Spam
Spam is the most annoying email byproduct because everybody gets it and nobody wants it. But there are steps you can take to reduce, filter and avoid Spam in the future. At first get used to the idea that you need more than one email address. At least one private and one for Spam. If you are a business you should have a custom solution. For now we talk private use. Spamers get hold of your email address in many different ways. The most common way is to have you sign up for something. A newsletter, a registration, a contest, anything that asks for your email address is a potential spamer or supplies spamers with your email address. Of course not all are bad but how do you know in advance. That's where you second email address comes handy. One of the free providers like Hotmail or Yahoo is good enough. Every time you have to give out your email address you use your Spam address. This keeps your email pre sorted between private and potential Spam. Also NEVER answer to a Spam message. This will only confirm your email address is valid and you'll get more unsolicited emails. It is a good idea not to download the messages on your Spam account. Instead you can only download the headers or subject line. This is a lot quicker. From here you can apply automatic filters to sort emails for you. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. We explain the steps in Outlook Express. Other email clients work in similar matter. For details on other email clients refer to the manual.

• Open Outlook Express
• Click on “Tools”, ”Message Rules”, ”Mail”. A new window opens.


• Select New Mail Rule.

• Now comes the part where you have to be creative.
• Remember just blocking the sender doesn't do much because spamers use a
  different sender address every day.
• First look at your spam mail. Search for reoccurring words or phrases in the
  header (Subject) or body (the mail itself) of the mail. Copy and Paste those words
  into the rules and apply them. You can sort private and business mail the same way.
  (See examples below)

In this example we delete advertising for viagra and to enlarge your ....
Lets say you got mails where it is clearly visible in the subject line what the mail is about. So we select subject line. You can also use "body" if these word are in the mail itself. Then you select what to do with it. In this case I delete it and don't process any more rules. Also note that spamers often disguise the words. Ad them to. Get creative. It may take one week to "train" your new spam filter, but it is worth the effort.


Lets say we have a second email account at "freenet" and we want to sort the incoming mail into a directory named "freenet". The below settings would do that for me.


I think you now know now what to do. Have Fun.

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Thunderbird a good free alternative email client
Thunderbird is a free alternative to Outlook Express with a very good and easy to use anti spam function.

Get it Free!